Each of the walls of large white boxes is stacked six across and five up, and together they form half of a room, an L-shaped stage within a stage. Projected across the surface of the boxes is a reedy plant, perhaps the same reedy plant that is sitting on the stage in front of the boxes. A barefoot man languishes at a piano set outside the square stage that the boxes form. As the audience quiets down, it becomes clear that Six Degrees of Freedom, the latest mixed-genre production of Smith/Wymore Disappearing Acts, has begun at the ODC Theater.
The man gets up and starts to explain what the piece is about, flipping through a binder of papers, reading the occasional stage direction. Nothing quite makes sense, though it’s all in clearly understandable language. Soon the mini stage is taken over by other images and four more performers: clouds appear on the boxes, someone says, “your breath smells like pancakes,” someone else talks about the stuffed toy she is holding – a “therapy” cat. There are dance-like moments and quirky exchanges. It’s all absurd, random, silly and entertaining.
The pianist asserts himself again, giving the other four performers stage directions, and they all break character. “Page 22,” he says, chiding them and insisting they should speak with “almost no affect at all.” “No affect is not really what we do,” responds one of the actor-dancers. And then they are miming drinking tea in couples, with a smirk, an odd accent. Nope. Next pair tries. Someone wails, “What happened to us? We used to be a team!”
There is a sequence in which one of the dancers is going through a box. He pulls something out – a cell phone. But that’s not what he sees. What he sees is, simply and abstractly, a rectangle, a white rectangle. He turns it one way and then another. The man lying on the floor nearby grabs the mic: “I want one,” he whispers. Soon they both have rectangles, but the rectangles are recording them in real time, projecting their faces on the boxes above. The images twist as the dancers change the angle and face of the cell phone cameras. Now the camera-phones are on the floor and they are above them.
In another sequence a dancer uses a spray can to create slight clouds in the air around him, the stage lights illuminating the spray so it appears like smoke. Where, you might wonder, are the mirrors?
One of the most compelling sequences is when two of the performers sat next to each other behind two boxes. One crawled into the box in front, disappearing. A real-time video projected onto the surface of the wall of white boxes to the side and behind showed the remaining seated woman. She is real, she is onstage, we can see her and see how her movements are perfectly imaged in the projection. All of a sudden, in the video, we see a second person, a man, climb out of one of the boxes and sit in the seat next to the seated woman. On the stage we see one woman, on the projected wall we see one woman and one man. The illusion is seamless.
It’s an exact moment of meaning. In which we are shown that what is here, there in front of us, may not be there at all. That the image and the self may just be something other. Something we have only perfectly imagined.
– Jaime Robles